Documentary a quest to find truth about Jewish baby deaths in Germany but it’s also the story of Gina Roitman’s personal voyage and her evolution.

“We wanted to make the film about the idea of reconciliation . . . the whole idea of letting go, figuring out what the past is and moving on.”

Jane Hawtin

broadcaster and co-producer of documentary

When she was a girl, Gina Roitman’s mother would repeatedly tell her a story of postwar Nazi atrocities that seemed too abhorrent to be believed.

It was a chilling tale of Jewish babies being murdered after the concentration camps had been liberated.

Some 50 years later, mature but still charmingly naive, the Montreal writer felt compelled to go to Germany to learn how much of her mother’s accounts were true.

It was a quest to discover whether Sula Miedwiecki’s tales of 52 baby deaths at a displaced persons camp outside of Passau were the exaggerated rants of a woman made paranoid by the wartime horrors beset upon her Jewish family; or whether there was indeed an evil force killing newborns.

Miedwiecki was so convinced that babies were being executed that she used one of the family’s 10 gold rubles — money earmarked for the start of a new life in Canada — to ensure that Gina was born at a birthing hospital in Passau and not at the camp.

“What I heard from my mother every year on my birthday is that she saved my life,” said Roitman.

But what, thought Roitman later, if it wasn’t just a story?

The result of her search for that answer is My Mother, the Nazi Midwife and Methe documentary My Mother, the Nazi Midwife and Me, which will air on CBC-TV’s documentary channel on Tuesday and again on May 18 at 8 p.m.

While an international whodunit gives the documentary its central plot and historical focal point — who, if anyone, was killing babies at the camp? — it is layered with the story of Roitman’s personal voyage; her evolution gives the film its emotional depth.

“I am a Pollyanna and always have seen the bright side of things, even though I grew up in an atmosphere where I was surrounded by ghosts,” said Roitman, 65, in a recent interview.

“My mother never stopped talking to me about the past. I used to say that her life officially stopped in 1939 when the Germans marched into Poland. She made a life, she had children. Whether or not she was ever very happy, I doubt it.”

Miedwiecki lost her five sisters, her first husband and 3-year-old son during World War II and developed a “devout hatred of Germans” that she tried to instill in her daughter. Roitman’s father lost his first wife and three children at Auschwitz.

But, as Roitman said, “I was not going to carry my parents’ history with me like Marley’s chains.”

“I wanted to go forward unencumbered, but the more I saw of what was going on, the stories we uncovered and the people who helped us uncover these stories . . . I realized this is a responsibility I have. My mother buried those stories in me all those years ago because I’m a storyteller and this is how I’m going to have to live my life.”

To tell those stories, Roitman went to Passau with a film crew and the documentary’s co-producer, broadcaster Jane Hawtin. It was just outside the city, at the Pocking-Waldstadt DP camp governed by the Americans, where her parents met and married. The camp was home to more than 7,000 people, most of Jewish heritage, until it was disbanded in 1949.

A disproportionate number of babies were dying at the camp in 1946 and ’47. Roitman was born in January 1948. Miedwiecki died when Roitman was 28.

While Roitman had largely disregarded her mother’s stories, an email exchange with writer Anna Rosmus convinced her that the baby deaths might have been more than just rumours. Rosmus was a Passau resident who stirred great resentment and anger when she researched and wrote about the city’s Nazi past.

On her trips to Passau, a southeastern city where Adolf Hitler once lived, Roitman takes the temperature of a city that appears incapable of completely casting aside its Nazi roots, she interacts with students who had never previously met a Jew and she encounters Solamon Brunner, a Jewish survivor who has clear memories of what went on after the war.

Brunner tells Roitman that the Americans overseeing the DP camp noticed there were an unusual number of infant deaths. To discover why, he recounts, the bodies were exhumed and it was found they were killed by someone pushing in on the soft fontanels of the babies’ heads.

The Americans, to avoid panic or hysteria, worked quickly to uncover a culprit. They found the same Nazi midwife was present for all the deaths. She received a hasty trial and was given a life sentence.

“It was covered up,” said Roitman. “I don’t think the people who lost those 52 babies knew how their babies died.”

Despite extensive searches through public records, Roitman, Hawtin and those helping them — including a former German judge — have yet to find an account of the Nazi midwife’s trial. Those records appear to have been lost.

At first Hawtin believed the film couldn’t be made without uncovering the woman’s name. But she said the documentary is mostly about the odyssey Roitman undertakes in order to deal with her past and is not strictly a historic retelling of the postwar murders.

“It would weaken it if the film was only about the history, that story about the actual murders that took place,” said Hawtin. “But from the beginning it has always been about Gina’s journey . . . We wanted to make the film about the idea of reconciliation . . . the whole idea of letting go, figuring out what the past is and moving on.”

After spending time in Passau, Roitman isn’t convinced the town has completely buried its Nazi sympathies. Passau is where the Hitler’s paramilitary guard, the schutzstaffel (the SS), was trained. Neo-Nazis continued to hold summer rallies there until 2001. As well, the books written by Rosmus keep going missing from the Passau library, which is now located in the building where the birthing hospital used to be.

Roitman hopes the documentary will drive home the idea that everyone should remain vigilant in the face of hatred. We can’t, she says, forget our past.

“We’re not safe. None of us are safe. The world is perilous place,” she said. “We have to become knowledgeable about what’s going on around us. We have to get into the fight. We have to speak up. We can’t allow ourselves to be trampled, our rights to be taken away. It’s a slippery slope.”

“My Mother, the Nazi Midwife and Me” will air on the CBC’s documentary channel Tuesday, and again May 18 at 8 p.m.